Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified

Last year they tried restricting the OS from creating new volumes unless all drives in it were Synology branded. People tore them a new asshole in the press and they backed away from that.

Now their newest DSM 7.4 release features a new smart storage system with postprocessing deduplication and compression. I tried to enable that on my own volume for testing, but nope: it only works on “pure Synology” volumes.

Fuck that. Synology, get this out of your damn heads. I will never, never buy your stupid, overpriced drives. It won’t happen. Never. And on top of the ludicrous price premium, if one breaks, how do I can get a replacement urgently? If my IronWolf blows up, I can drive over to Central Computer and come home with another just like it. Amazon has few Synology drives in stock and none of them are large. When I have a dead drive, the last thing I’m gonna want to do is go on an urgent quest for a replacement unicorn.

I’m done with ‘em. It’s clear they’re fixated on this stupid idea and aren’t going to give it up. Well, good luck with that and your remaining customer base, which no longer includes me.

Depending on the number of drives, you could instead probably afford some fancy cowboy footwear to go with your alternative purchases too.

Also depending on your preferred boot environment of course . . .

You also can invert the relationship and run a NAS on a physical home server. My storage solution is a JBOD ("Just a bunch of disks") attached to a Proxmox virtualization host, where my home server runs as a VM inside Proxmox and then exposes selected directories via Samba to the home network. There's no second computer, I'm just running ~5 of them on one physical server. But by doing this, I get some isolation where if I've downloaded a questionable file, I can quarantine and inspect it (and roll back to a VM checkpoint if it compromises the machine) before I unleash it on the non-technical users of my home network.

I agree! Maybe my comment is misunderstood. I'm not saying "NAS" is the better term. Instead, I'm saying "NAS" is a common word that people have settled on in the home consumer market. The word "NAS" is literally imprinted on the outside of the box from Synology, QNAP, UGREEN etc even though they also run apps unrelated to pure NAS functionality.

>NAS brands show up on Google/Amazon searches because they're cross-advertising,

Right... but NAS still shows up in unpaid results even when using the specific term "home server". E.g. for Google query : https://www.google.com/search?q=%22home+server%22+for+jellyf...

... the #1 search result at the top is this unsponsored thread from reddit mentioning "NAS" repeatedly from various commenters : https://old.reddit.com/r/JellyfinCommunity/comments/1n48cc7/...

So... asking about running on jellyfin on a "home server", inevitably leads to responders talking about "NAS" ... but wait a sec... if it's a NAS running the Jellyfin music server, it's not really a NAS anymore and the "home server" should be perfectly fine terminology for that! But the replies keep using that word "NAS"! (See how people can keep going around in circles?) The original poster asking the question then adds a reply saying "From the others comments it also seems i should look into getting this NAS thing". Now he becomes one of them and starts using the word "NAS" on the way to having a "home server running jellyfin". The cycle is complete.

From that thread and observing how people naturally talk about this in the home consumer market, the word "NAS" just overwhelms "home server". Keeping the purity of the word "NAS" is not possible anymore.

Likewise, people use the word "phone" to describe the slab in their pocket even though it also has a camera, GPS navigator, calendar, etc. But we don't call it a more general term such as "multifunction pocket computer" or "PDA Personal Digital Assistant". Instead, everybody settled on the word "phone". Most people don't even use it as a phone but rather as a 2-way pager for text chats. Nevertheless, "phone" is the word we use even though it's inconsistent with all the features the device has and how we actually use it every day.

I think synedoche is relevant to how we use both "NAS" and "phone" in seemingly inconsistent ways : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche